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Sep 13, 2016

Samsung may be in talks with AMD, Nvidia to license graphics IP

Joel Hruska

Samsung and Apple are the two
titans of the smartphone industry, but they’ve taken very different
routes to get there. Where Apple has invested a great deal of time and
money into building its own custom SoCs and designing its own
microarchitecture, Samsung
has historically used cores from many other companies, including Texas
Instruments and Qualcomm. Last year, the company announced it would
bring its first custom CPU core to market in 2016. Now, it’s reportedly
in talks with both AMD and Nvidia, looking for a graphics core to match
its custom CPU.

We’ve heard rumors of Samsung wanting a custom
GPU core before, but nothing concrete has come of it thus far. It’s
hard to find good data on recent smartphone GPU market share, but this
graph by Jon Peddie Research shows the lay of the land from two years ago.

Given that Intel and Vivante are both out of
the game (Vivante seems to have pivoted to focus on embedded and IoT),
the major players here are Imagination Technologies (Apple’s preferred
partner) and Qualcomm. Both Nvidia and AMD have graphics IP that Samsung
could license — the key question is, is Samsung just looking to cut a
deal that gives them access to certain patents so they can legally roll
their own solution, or do they want a part that’s designed by either AMD
or Nvidia?

It’s not actually clear which company would be the better fit. Nvidia manufacturers one of the best Android tablets you can buy, but recently canceled
its plans to upgrade the Shield tablet. It’s been speculated that this
might have been due to pressure from Nintendo and its upcoming NX.
Nvidia is believed to have won that design
and may have been prevented from bringing a competitor product to
market. Over the last few years Nvidia has focused much more on
automotive and deep learning than on launching mobile products.

AMD famously sold its mobile IP to Qualcomm,
who created Adreno. There’s no reason Team Red couldn’t build a new
low-power GPU, and the company’s focus on embedded and semicustom design
makes it a good fit for Samsung. CEO Lisa Su has also talked about
wanting to lean more on AMD’s patent portfolio while building out
additional semi-custom wins. The question is whether AMD has the
manpower or current resources to design something in-house. GCN isn’t
known for being a low-power GPU architecture, after all, and AMD already
has plenty to keep it busy with Microsoft’s Scorpio,Vega, and Zen all dropping in 2017.

Speaking of Samsung’s M1, Anandtech got a look
at the architecture during Hot Chips 2016. The chip is an out-of-order
design capable of decoding four instructions per cycle and with a
perceptron-based branch predictor. This last isn’t a brand-new feature,
but companies are often cagey about the exact details of how they
implement branch prediction in silicon.

Above, we see Samsung’s M1 performance as
compared with a Cortex-A57, albeit one clocked 200MHz below the Samsung
chip. Performance is fairly good, even if the chip really only
distinguishes itself in a few tests. As a first effort, it’s a solid
core. If Samsung wants to pair it with a GPU of their own design, AMD and Nvidia
are the companies to talk to. It could take several years to bring a
new solution to market. But if Samsung wants Apple-like control over its
own product lines, creating new GPU and CPU IP is the way to do it.